Global Health Watch 1 in one file

handle the consequent social and economic dislocations, and in some cases
facing active hostility from international lending agencies to using existing
resources and policy instruments. Antonia’s story brings the issue of global
trade rules as potential health threats into sharper focus.
It begins a century ago with Mexican land reforms that created subsistence
and smallholding production plots. These plots were big enough to feed a
family and earn some capital by selling to local markets, but did not provide
(and were never intended to provide) economies of scale comparable to those
of modern corporate farming practices. In the run-up to the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Mexican government ended its subsidies
to ‘small-scale producers of basic crops’ including corn (Preibisch et al. 2002),
the main ingredient of tortillas, Mexico’s staple food. When NAFTA opened
the Mexico-US border, corn from the US flooded the Mexican market. Largescale
agribusiness is massively subsidized in the US: in 2001, corn cost US$
3.41 a barrel to produce in the US, but sold on the world market for $2.28
(Carlsen 2003). Currency crises and IMF conditional loans also played a role
in the rapid decline of Mexico’s corn prices. Following the collapse of the
peso in 1995, the bail-out organized by the Clinton administration included
a US$ 1 billion export credit that obliged Mexico to purchase US corn. Predictably,
Mexican imports of US corn to Mexico rose by 120% in a year (Carlsen
2003).
Mexican corn production stagnated while prices declined. Small farmers
were hardest hit, becoming much poorer than they were in the early 1990s
(Condesa Consulting Group 2004), despite efforts by the Mexican government
to reintroduce some of the subsidies (ICTSD 2002). Some 700,000 agricultural
jobs disappeared over the same period. The lack of demand for farm labour
depressed wages by 2001 to less than half of what they were 20 years earlier.
Rural poverty rates rose to over 70%; the minimum wage lost over 75% of its
purchasing power; infant mortality rates of the poor increased; and wage inequalities
became the worst in Latin America (Lichfield 2000, Schwartz 2002).
Between 1984, when Mexico’s 1982 debt crisis led to one of the first and most
wrenching programmes of lender-driven economic adjustment, and 2000, the
share of national income flowing to the poorest decile of the population fell
from 1.7% to 1.5%, while the share of the richest decile increased from 33% to
39% (Schwartz 2002).
Adding insult to injury, as corn prices fell the price of commercially marketed
tortillas almost tripled, because just two companies produce nearly all
the corn products in Mexico. The Mexican government, apparently to ensure a
cheap corn supply for these two companies, chose not to avail itself of NAFTA-
Health for all in a ‘borderless world’?
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